Little Quiapo, Filipino Buffet

LTH,

Noticed Little Quiapo last week, thought I'd try them for lunch but they're closed on Mondays. There's been a few mentions of the Clark Street Little Quiapo, which I think is closed, on LTH, but nothing substantive. Price for Little Quiapo's buffet is $8.95 lunch and dinner Monday - Thursday, $10.95 Friday, Saturday Sunday.

I won't have a chance to check it out until later in the week, love to have an early report. Lincoln Village has turned into buffet central, with Hong Kong Buffet and Old Country Buffet Little Quiapo makes three.

Little Quiapo


Enjoy,
Gary

Little Quiapo Buffet
6259 N McCormick
Chicago, IL 60616
Lincoln Village - Lincoln & McCormick
Closed on Monday

Gary,

I guess the Little Quiapo empire has expanded. When there is a choice on Clark St, between the other Little Quiapo and Fish Pond across the street. There are stronger leanings to go to Fish Pond.

I look forward to your comments on latest outpost of Little Quiapo. At the least the exterior looks a lot more friendly than the original location.

Fish Pond
4416 N. Clark St.

Little Quiapo
4423 N. Clark St.

Regards,

I was driving up Clark street tonight and took note that there was a big sign in the window of the Little Quiapo just north of Montrose that read:

"Moved to 6259 N McCormick Blvd"

I guess they're not open anymore on Clark.

Sharona

I am very interested in checking out this location. I was not a fan of the Clark location so hopefully this location will serve to be more promising!

foodie1 wrote:I am very interested in checking out this location. I was not a fan of the Clark location so hopefully this location will serve to be more promising!

I'm not trying to be a smart ass, but I wonder what makes you think that the food will be any different in the new location? Do they have a new chef?

Sharona wrote:"Moved to 6259 N McCormick Blvd"

Is that in the Lincolnwood Town Center Mall? Are they replacing a mall-sattelite restaurant, do you think? That would be interesting in and of itself.

Mhays wrote:

Sharona wrote:"Moved to 6259 N McCormick Blvd"

Is that in the Lincolnwood Town Center Mall?

Definitely not. The mall is at Touhy (7200). This sounds more like Lincoln Village.

Best,
Michael

G Wiv wrote:Little Quiapo Buffet
6259 N McCormick
Chicago, IL 60616
Lincoln Village - Lincoln & McCormick
Closed on Monday

stevez wrote:

foodie1 wrote:I am very interested in checking out this location. I was not a fan of the Clark location so hopefully this location will serve to be more promising!

I'm not trying to be a smart ass, but I wonder what makes you think that the food will be any different in the new location? Do they have a new chef?

It wasnt so much the quality of the food... but the location itself. I did not care for the Clark location because it was dark, cramped, the food experiences I had there were not as fresh and it just wasn't a pleasant atmosphere. As for the chef during the time, I'm not sure which uncle of a friend was cooking at the time, or if the same uncle of a friend will continue to cook at the new location.

However I did attend dinner there tonight. I was very pleased with the atmosphere and thought the food was much better than what I had in the past at the Clark location. The offerings were fresh, good compared to the authentic foods my mother and I make (although some dishes I didn't care for), and I plan to return again.

Prices:
$8.95 for both lunch and dinner, Tuesday - Thursday.
$10.95 for both lunch and dinner seafood buffet Friday- Sunday.
Restaurant is closed on Mondays.

The offer a large banquet area which can be rented out for parties that Filipinos are known to have. There is also a "kiddie" section which is enclosed and has very casual seating that allows kids to romp about, which is common in filipino gatherings. Even the buffet table was decorated like a Filipino "Jeepney", a whimsical mode of transportation resembling an open retro school bus.

As for offerings, there were 3 distinct buffet sections - main steam table, dessert table and fried foods table.

The main steam table offered:
steamed white rice and garlic/egg fried rice.
pancit bihon - thin rice noodles with vegetables, pork and chicken
pancit palabok - thick rice noodles with seafood and a shrimp garlic sauce
chicken adobo - chicken marinated in soy sauce, vinegar, garlic & onions
kare kare - beef stew with a peanut butter based sauce, green beans, japanese eggplant
pinakbet - vetegable dish flavored with shrimp paste and green beans, squash, japanese eggplant, garlic and onions
pinakbet hipon - same as above with shrimp
grilled rib tips
paksiw - ham hocks stewed in soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, garlic, onions
dinuguan - beef blood stew
sinigang baboy - tamarind stew with pork belly
supas ng sotanghon - rice noodle soup with chicken broth


The fried section featured:
crispy tapas - fried ham hocks
lumpia & lumpia shanghai - thick vegetable eggrolls and thin beef eggrolls
crispy pusit - fried squid
fried fish (unsure what kind)


The dessert section included:
creamy filipino fruit salad w/ macupuno (shredded young coconut)
bibingka - sweet rice cake topped with coco jam
leche flan - egg custard with caramel/maple sauce
ginataan - warm rice flour ball & coconut milk dessert w/bananas and jackfruit
fresh cantelope & honeydew melon

I think I captured all the buffet offerings but may have missed a few. This buffet doesnt change too much through the weekday/night.... but may include more seafood dishes Friday - Sunday.

For the price, it was definitely a great bargain and I'm happy with the changes Little Quaipo has made. This is definitely a place I would return to again when I'm too lazy to cook authentic filipino dishes myself or when I dont want to make the trip to have my mom's home cooking.

Gonna have to take a drive over; I can't place it, but I sure would love to replace Sparky's favorite buffet (OCB) with a better one...

foodie1 wrote:For the price, it was definitely a great bargain and I'm happy with the changes Little Quaipo has made.

Foodie,

Thanks for the detailed post and roundup of Little Quiapo. I fully intend to go in the next week.

Enjoy,
Gary

I live relatively close to this restaurant and I have friends with a fondness for this food - so I'll probably visit during the next week. From what I see in the photograph of the restaurant it appears to me to be next to the movie theater, across from the Home Depot on McCormick Boulevard, set back about 1/2 block from McCormick - not in the Lincoln Village shopping Center; there was some sort of game room there for a long time. Thanks for the mention.

Well, we went to Little Quiapo before Sparky's soccer practice right around the corner, and I have to say I still don't get phillipino food. Of course, a buffet - although a great place to sample - isn't necessarily representing the freshest and best of a cuisine, so next time we'll try the menu.

They had salt-and-pepper shrimp (Sparky proclaiming "oooh, eyeballs!" every time he ate one) which were OK - many of the fried foods didn't fare well under the heat lamps. The lumpia were OK, the deep-fried pork hock was interesting, but the remainder of the food looked interesting, but tasted ordinary. I did like one of the soups very much; a light, lemony bean-thread affair. After seeing a phillipino (pilipino?) family celebrating with an ice cream dessert, we flagged a waiter to order Phillipino-style Halo-Halo. This has got to be the most underhanded system for getting kids to eat their vegetables that I've ever seen:



Yes, that is vanilla ice cream, sweetened milk mixed with crushed ice, corn, kidney beans, cubed carrots, gummi fruit, taro pudding, and sweet potato in a lighly cinnamony sauce reminiscent of orchata. I only got a few spoonfuls down, as I had filled up on a large order of fried.

Sparky, of course, ate only the ice cream.

If you've been missing pork in your diet lately, then a trip to Little Quiapo's buffet will remedy that quickly. With dishes like lechon, fried ham hocks, pickled pigs ears, pork blood stew, rib tips, pork meat loaf, peanut pork stew (kare kare), chicharons, and more pork dishes whose names escape me, LQ has got you covered. Besides getting your pork fix, you'll also get your pork fat fix too, because I found the meat consisted mostly of just that. Of all the pork dishes I tried, the pork meat loaf stuffed with a hot dog(!) was my favorite. Moist and flavorful with a sweet sauce, it was the surprise dish of the lunch. The lechon which was what initially drew me to the place was a little disappointing due to the above noted fat to meat ratio...but it sure as hell looked good and the sound of the cleaver chopping up a fresh batch brought me back to it more than once.

Besides the pig, LQ also offers up a stir fried beef dish which I didn't try, and a variety of seafood options. Fried whole shrimp with heads on, fried calamari, fried butterfish, squid stew, and braised mussels were all options today. Not one to risk future regret with mussels from a buffet, I stuck to the fried stuff...namely the shrimp and calamari. I'd been craving fried shrimp heads for awhile, and while the first round of shrimp and calamari weren't bad, they weren't great either as one would expect given that they weren't fresh from the fryer. A second round however were down right awful, clearly suffering from heat lamp syndrome...rubbery and dry as hell.

After eating way too much pork fat and fried foods (they also have egg rolls and lumpia shanghai which are mini beef filled egg rolls), I wandered over to the dessert bar and overzealously filled my plate with casava and rice based offerings. I should have tested them out first, because they were so dense and not entirely flavorful either that I could barely eat more than a couple bites. I did however enjoy a coconut milk based soup/porridge dish that had corn in it, but I was too full at that point to really get into it.

All that being said, with little Filipino options that I know of in the Chicago area, Little Quiapo's buffet is a solid place to go to sample a wide variety of dishes and and to scare the hell out of a cardiologist.

If you want a Filipino sunday brunch buffet experience, I'd suggest Filipiniana in Niles, over Little Quiapo or Fishpond.

Filipiniana Restaurant
9060 W Golf Rd
Niles, IL 60714
(847) 298-9332

pigOut wrote: The lechon which was what initially drew me to the place was a little disappointing due to the above noted fat to meat ratio...but it sure as hell looked good and the sound of the cleaver chopping up a fresh batch brought me back to it more than once.

Craving some roast pork, I decided to give LQ another shot today for lunch and was quite happy I did. Succulent roast pork just seconds from being hacked up by a giant cleaver, was a lot more meaty than my previous visit and resulted in a much more balanced bite. Tender moist slow roasted meat played nicely with the abundance of crisp skin and fatty bits. It was really spectacular, especially for something being offered up as part of a buffet. I have no idea what the sauce is they serve with it, but it works well.



That being said, it is still a buffet, an inexpensive one at that, and the other offerings as mentioned before didn't really entice me anymore than they did on my initial visit. But, I was okay with this as it allowed me to load up on the lechon. Sadly, the pork meatloaf stuffed with hotdogs that I surprisingly enjoyed on my past visit wasn't an offering today....

pigOut wrote:

pigOut wrote:



But, I was okay with this as it allowed me to load up on the lechon. Sadly, the pork meatloaf stuffed with hotdogs that I surprisingly enjoyed on my past visit wasn't an offering today....

nice looking lechon in that pic, also the pork meatloaf stuffed with hotdogs intrigues me for some reason. Moving Little Quiapo to the top of my "places to try" list. thanks.

Mhays wrote:After seeing a phillipino (pilipino?) family celebrating with an ice cream dessert, we flagged a waiter to order Phillipino-style Halo-Halo. This has got to be the most underhanded system for getting kids to eat their vegetables that I've ever seen:



Yes, that is vanilla ice cream, sweetened milk mixed with crushed ice, corn, kidney beans, cubed carrots, gummi fruit, taro pudding, and sweet potato in a lighly cinnamony sauce reminiscent of orchata. I only got a few spoonfuls down, as I had filled up on a large order of fried.

Sparky, of course, ate only the ice cream.

I am very curious about this dessert. We had something with a bit of similarity at Sticky Rice a year or so ago -- a dessert with sweetened milk, crushed ice, kidney beans, hominy, and some other things we could not identify. Does anyone know anything about this type of dish which seems so utterly foreign to American eating patterns?

I also need to try out this restaurant, though I think I would like to understand Filipino cuisine a little better first.

I love love me some halo halo. Do you have any specific questions?

As I learned growing up, my non-Filipino friends would not try halo halo no matter how convincing I thought I was. You're right, it might be just too far outside most people's culinary experience. I can only say it's an effective dessert in the Philippines because:

1. It's ridiculously hot in the Philippines, so shaved ice is a good foundation from which to build a dessert,
2. There aren't many cows, and again, really hot, so milk will usually take the form of canned evaporated milk
3. Chinese immigrants brought with them sweet beans, which are preserved against spoilage, and
4. It's filled out with local fruits, e.g. coconut and palm jelly, jackfruit, bananas, etc.

The end product is a cold, creamy, sweet, and tropical melange. Possibly strange, but definitely good.

Oh and I'm not sure if I've commented on it before, but Li'l Q is a great Filipino buffet, and the perfect place to try halo halo or whatever Filipino food you've never had before. Have fun!

mike

I kind of liked what I had at Sticky Rice, have not had halo halo at Little Quiapo (yet).

So this was not a negative comment, just a note that this is a really, really strange combination by American standards. Corn and beans in a dessert? It's all a matter of what you are used to, of course, and I am not even sure why this combination provokes such a reaction. When we had it at Sticky Rice, my fairly adventurous teenagers were somewhat horrified. I guess I am partly trying to understand that reaction, why it seems so very odd to Americans.

What you say about the milk makes sense. And shaved ice is a standby when there is little refrigeration -- I'm thinking about the old shaved ice carts in Chicago neighborhoods, very yummy, and predating ice cream treats kept frozen by electricity, I assume.

The Chinese sweet beans you refer to -- is this a preservation method or are the beans sweet? Is this the same as the sweet red bean paste in what I call fried sesame balls, but which probably have a proper name that I don't know? And are the beans in the halo halo this kind of particular bean, or as I recall from Sticky Rice, they seemed like canned kidney beans (but it has been awhile).

my Filipino wife likes halo halo, and so does our daughter.

The combination of ingredients(the beans) seems odd to me but that does not keep me from trying it. I just dont do dessert very often, since I mostly fill up on the pancit, lumpia, and lechon @ Filipino parties I go to.

No negativity taken! I agree, the combination is not usual by Western standards, but for whatever reason (and my workday google search has turned up nothing so far...) Eastern Asian folks like beans in their desserts. From what I understand about Chinese desserts, the beans used in halo halo are a mix of many of the same types used in their pastries -- mung, red, black -- but not crushed into a paste, and include other types (garbanzo, kidney). Since there is no set recipe, you'll find some places will use kidney beans, some won't, and some might not use beans whatsoever.

beans, uh, I mean mike

Mikelipino wrote:Eastern Asian folks like beans in their desserts.

Much better than beans in the ears!

Right - I was kind of ready for the beans as I've had red bean paste desserts - though kidney is a bit different. The corn and what looked like cubed carrots (turned out to be sweet potato, which makes much more sense) were what threw me.

I'm not a fan of bean desserts in general; I don't like the texture (with the exception of the fried bean paste buns at TTOWA) so it wasn't really my thing, but I was very glad to have tried it, the flavors all worked together very well.

Halo-Halo is a direct descendant of the Malay/Indonesian/Singaporean dessert ice kacang, which is shaved iced with red beans, sweet corn, jelly, etc. with either condensed or evaporated milk, or coconut milk. No one who has lived in, travelled, or grown up in Southeast Asia, will find the flavor combinations "strange", since almost every country has a version of shaved ice with milk and beans/corn/etc.

The weekday buffet at Little Quiapo is an excellent deal at $8.95 but didn't win me over to Filipino food. It's not a cuisine I know much about but I didn't fall in love with Little Quiapo's cooking.

The deep-fried appetizers—two types of lumpia, pork hocks, squid, whole shrimp and whole butter fish—all suffered from being held under the warming lights. I found their atchara—a sweet-sour green papaya salad with raisins—to be a wonderful foil for all that greasy food.

Many of the dishes on the main table are long-cooked stews, well suited to buffet-style serving. I especially enjoyed sweet-salty, fall-off-the-bone chicken adobo as well as pinakbet, long-cooked vegetables made pungent with salty shrimp. But the same sweet, salty, fishy notes were hit again and again in dish after dish and quickly became tiring. This is not subtle cooking. Fresh lumpia, stuffed with barely cooked vegetables, really saved the day with fresh, light flavors. A syrupy dipping sauce for the lumpia overwhelmed with sweetness but was easily avoided.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed the dessert table with a variety of starchy gels, many with coconut.



On weekends a fourth table with more chicken and pork dishes (including lechon) is offered. These are probably worth trying but you won't go wanting for meat during the week. Even though I didn't love the buffet I'd still recommend a visit. It's a great opportunity to try a wide variety of Filipino dishes at a bargain price. I'll almost certainly get back there sometime.

Little Quiapo
6259 N McCormick Blvd
Chicago
773-279-8861

HI,

The only two Filippino restaurants I ever visited that did not have a steam table front and present was the now shuttered Cebu Cebu and Rambutan. Everywhere else great and small, there is a steam table with food often looking worse for wear.

Rambutan was a fusion of French and Filippino with preparations and presentations that surprised my Filippina friend Helen. Their service was almost entirely small plates or at least that was how we ordered. We went for a birthday celebration only once, because after a amounting a bill over a $100, we were still hungry. As we left, we saw a Filippino couple walk in with several teenage sons. We estimated they either spent a pretty hefty amount of money there or ate somewhere else afterwards.

Cebu Cebu was approaching fine dining. If their food came from a steam table, I happily never saw it. They had many elegant presentations that were as good as they looked. A thread on Cebu Cebu can be found here. If only it were closer to me, I would have visited more often.

Thinking about it a bit more, Uncle Mike's Place - Filipino Breakfast, American Diner may be a place where it may be Filippino without the steam table. I have not yet gone, though it is high on my list. The breakfasts look very similar to what Helen prepares with eggs, garlic rice, fresh salsa, tocino or Loganisa.

The party room at Little Quiapo is terrific. If I ever felt confident people would enjoy the food there, it would be a great location for our holiday party. Since we live to eat well, I shy away from this idea.

There are good elements to Filippino food that practically are not seen in restaurants.

Regards,

Being out in the western burbs, I hadn't eaten Filipino since Cebu closed, but now there is a Filipino booth in the Super H Mart in Naperville thats pretty good and cheap.

[Edited to correct location]

I think Filipiniana right now is probably the best home-cooking style Filipino restaurant in the Chicagoland area. Check out this thread: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=22084&hilit=filipiniana